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Collect Britain

Search tips

The basic search box

To enter a query type in a few descriptive words in the search box (found at the top right of each page) and hit the ‘Go’ button to return a list of relevant results. e.g. Kensington parishes

The results

The results are initially displayed in relevance order. Results can also be returned according to the Title of the object, the Date, or the Collection to which they belong simply by selecting the relevant heading from the results page.

Refining your search

If the results returned are not what you expected please be sure to check your spelling or try using one of the following options.

Phrase matching

You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names e.g. “Kensington Gardens”.

Stemming

The search engine uses stemming. For example, a search on cooking will return results on cooking, cook, Cook’s, cooker, and cooks.

Boolean operators

By default the search engine includes the Boolean operator AND between query terms but all the usual Boolean terms can be used.

pyrotechnist AND Robinson will match any objects where both terms are used.
pyrotechnist NOT Robinson will match any objects where pyrotechnist is mentioned but Robinson is not.
pyrotechnist OR Robinson will match any objects where either term is used.

Using brackets

Use of brackets to group terms eg. (city not london) and map is not possible.

Stop words

The search engine ignores common words and characters known as stop words. These include most pronouns and articles. The search engine automatically disregards such terms as any, also, an, and all. These terms rarely help to narrow a search and can significantly slow searching.

Advanced searching

From the advanced search page you can perform a specialist search on the objects on the Collect Britain site by Title, Date, Creator, Object Type or Location. You can also search for the Penny Illustrated Newspaper collection by Subject, Town or UK Postcode within a specific date range if required. The Subject Search allows you to browse the objects on the site by category.